New Ways of Organizing Data Could Change Nature of Computers

Published: April 4th, 1997

Scientists' designs are based on how people
tend to remember and classify information

By Jeffrey R. Young

The computer "desktop" started out as a tidy metaphor for keeping track of
a few documents in a handful of folders. But as people do
more with their computers, and as the machines hold more information, many
desktops have become disaster areas -- crowded with
overlapping windows and with folders on top of folders inside of other
folders. Information ends up lost in the electronic shuffle, and
users forget which application is doing what in which window.

It may be time for a better desktop, or perhaps for a whole new metaphor
for organizing information on personal computers -- maybe
one that's a little more user-friendly. Consider these:

"Lifestreams," a system created at Yale University, organizes everything
on a computer's hard drive according to the moment it was
created or altered. Rather than shuffle icons and folders around a desktop,
a user can navigate a chronological stream of documents
representing every part of his or her digital life. Researchers say people
often remember things based on when they did them: For
instance, it might be easy to remember that you worked on a report right
before you wrote the e-mail you're looking for now. Presenting
a wide range of documents by date might also give you a better sense of the
context in which you created both the e-mail and the report,
helping you see how they might have influenced each other.

"Pad++," a set of graphical navigation tools created by researchers at
the University of New Mexico and at New York University,
makes the user a kind of helicopter pilot flying over a landscape of
information, recognizing landmarks much the way you would
recognize your neighborhood from above. The researchers say people remember
things based on their location, so why not tap into
spatial-memory skills to help organize information on the computer? Like
Lifestreams, this system is also designed to let people see more
information on the screen at one time, so that connections among data
become evident.

"Elastic Windows," one of several new software programs developed at the
University of Maryland at College Park, displays many
windows in full view at the same time, rather than one behind another. The
hope is that users will be able to switch among tasks more
quickly and easily.

At the heart of these projects is the idea that the current framework for
organizing electronic data doesn't take advantage of the mind's
ability to make connections among disparate pieces of information. "We're
underutilizing our remarkable human possibilities," says Ben
Schneiderman, director of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer
Interaction Laboratory.

Another goal of the projects is to let users spot patterns and make new
connections within a vast amount of information. Researchers
hope that putting more on the screen at once will allow whole
constellations of data to emerge, helping chart the way in the universe of
information.

They agree on one thing: The desktop as we know it is overdue for
improvement. The new systems take advantage of the way the mind
conceptualizes things rather than the way paper has always led us to
organize information. "We've sort of been locked in this
menus-and-windows metaphor," says James D. Hollan, head of the
computer-science department at New Mexico. "I think we're seeing
a movement toward more-active information space, where we're not mimicking
the printed page."

Another researcher puts it more bluntly: "The desktop is dead."

The idea behind Lifestreams is that the things people do on their computers
form a kind of digital diary. "Lives are time-ordered, so your
electronic life should be also," says David Gelernter, a computer-science
professor at Yale who invented the system.

The software does away with divisions among different kinds of documents.
Every file -- whether electronic mail, a word-processing
document, or a spreadsheet -- is part of the same personal-information
stream. There's no need to make up a name for each new file
and decide where it fits in with others. New documents are simply
identified by date and time.

In a prototype, documents are displayed as pages stacked like an infinite
hand of playing cards, with the top left portion of each page
exposed. Selecting a document brings it into view for reading or editing.
Users can also rely on a powerful search tool to sort through the
stream. Documents identified in searches, or substreams, also appear in
chronological order.

"It really helps people deal with information overload," says Eric T.
Freeman, who recently completed his doctorate at Yale by working
on the project. "People remember when something happened."

Dr. Freeman has put most of the 22,000 documents he's created in the past
few years on the Lifestreams system. This has helped him
quickly locate such information as a newspaper article about Lifestreams
requested by a reporter. "If I had to find it in a traditional file
structure, it would take me all day," he says.

Now he wants to bring a commercial version of Lifestreams to a software
store near you. He's helped set up Lifestreams Inc., and
expects the company to offer a retail version of the software within two
years. In the meantime, researchers have set up a World-Wide
Web site that offers technical information as well as screen shots of the
software in action
(here).

To some people, of course, a lengthy time line seems far more cumbersome
than the familiar desktop. Dr. Gelernter acknowledges that
the Lifestreams system might not work for every user. "I've never claimed
it's right for everyone," he says, "but it's right for me, and it
seems pretty clear that there are a fair number of people with the same
general requirements I have."

Pad++ (pronounced "pad plus plus") doesn't exactly replace the desktop
metaphor. It still relies on the idea that an electronic storage
area can be thought of as a kind of space. But the system takes the spatial
analogy farther than the desktop ever has, extending the
workspace beyond the confines of the computer monitor. Here, your workspace
becomes an endless surface, and the monitor acts as a
viewfinder. It's as if you were peering down on an electronic world below.

Users get around this space by what is called a "pan-and-zoom" interface.
By backing up or zooming out, they can look down on a
whole field of documents, the pages looking like small squares and the
words as illegible blurs. Zooming in slightly makes major headings
readable; zooming closer still brings a particular document into clear
view, so that it can be read or edited. You arrange documents on
this surface the same way you might lay out on a table the notes and other
materials for a paper you're writing, grouping them
conceptually.

Jonathan Meyer, a research scientist at New York University who is working
on Pad++, says the system taps into people's remarkable
ability to remember things based on location. "People have vast spatial
memories," he notes. "You remember how to get home at night,
and you do it without much trouble at all."

With a system like Pad++, people could use visual cues to remember where on
their computers they've put their papers or notes, he
predicts. "In Pad, you can fly around and say, 'I remember that
rectangle.'"

Of course, providing a larger space can make it easier for some users to
get lost in cyberspace. In early versions of Pad++, users could
zoom in so close that they seemed to be looking through a magnifying glass
-- not the best way to find information spread out over a
large area.

"That's one of the things we're working on," says Mr. Meyer, who works
under the direction of Ken Perlin, the N.Y.U. professor who
invented Pad++.

Benjamin Bederson, an assistant professor of computer science at the
University of New Mexico who is also working on the project,
says Pad++ is particularly useful for navigating the World-Wide Web. As
users move from Web page to Web page, the software can
help create a visual map of where they've been, instead of the simple list
of visited sites that current browsers present. Unlike a list, such
a map might reveal relationships among the sites you've visited.

Researchers have set up an on-line slide show to demonstrate Pad++
(here).

At Maryland, Dr. Schneiderman oversees a number of computer-navigation
projects, among them Elastic Windows. In most current
systems, only one window is active at a time. In this system, however,
several windows are visible and active at once, joined on the
screen like floor tiles. As one window is enlarged, other open windows
shrink. The program lets you move data from one application to
another far more easily than is possible now.

Having so many open windows can be confusing at first, and Dr. Schneiderman
acknowledges that "it does take users a few minutes to
get acquainted with the idea."

Another research project at Maryland is called "TreeViz." It can scan a
hard drive to present a single, graphical picture of its contents. "It
gives you X-ray vision to see your whole hard drive at once," says Dr.
Schneiderman. A quarter of the files on most hard drives are
duplicates or documents that are no longer needed, he estimates. The
software is designed to help people root out this deadwood and
free up more storage space.

A list of projects at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer
Interaction Laboratory is available on the Web
(here).

Researchers say the tools they are working on could have a considerable
impact on how people work with computers. The systems
could give expert users more -- and easier -- control over their electronic
lives. And Dr. Schneiderman and others hope that the tools
can help simplify computer use, so that newcomers will have an easier time
becoming comfortable with the machines.

As Yale's Dr. Gelernter puts it, the goal is "to make life less of a
nuisance. Make the complexities and depredations of the modern world
less of a pain. Give us more control over our lives, and more time to go
fishing."

Copyright 1997, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Posted with permission
on the Pad++ web site (http://www.cs.unm.edu/pad++/press/chronicle.html).
This article may not be published, reposted, or
redistributed without permission from The Chronicle.